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We have been fairly active in our Retro Lab as of late and would like to share some of our things that are new.

First off I know the BBS has been a regular topic on this site as of late but I do think there is lots to learn from BBS’s and where some things started for many people.

Stats on the BBS and new features:

We are happy to show several new sign ups and many new things have been added.

Message Boards:

We have always had Fidonet and DoveNet for our message boards. But are happy to announce the access of many Usenet Groups as well as DeveloperNet, MusicalNet, and GatorNet.
for over 390,000 messages to find what your looking for.

Door games:

Our door game selection has in the past been somewhat limited. However we are working hard to rectify that with the addition of Barron Realms Elite and many InterBBS games provided by
BBSLink, Including Legend of the Red Dragon [LORD], Legend of the Red Dragon: New World [LORD2], Planets: The Exploration of Space [TEOS], Operation: Overkill II [OOII], Trade Wars
2002 [TW2002], and Pimp Wars. More to follow very soon.

On the RetroDigital Retro Lab side of things…

An update from our previous post regarding the IBM PS/2. We did finally receive the network card for that system and have decided to mostly use it as a Dos Box. It currently is configured with MS-DOS 6.22, Full network support including Netware Client for Dos (which is setup to connect to our Netware 3.12 Server), As well as TCP-IP for DOS to be able to use the machine for telnet access to our BBS and many other great BBS’s out there.

On the not so Retro side of the Retro Lab:

We have rewired our server rack.. Added a few more servers as a part of our learning and also to help provide services to other people (like our BBS)
New servers include two HP 9000 rack servers. On top of all our other Retro items we enjoy we also really enjoy working with HP-UX and CDE (Common Desktop Environment)

Last but not least

We are not just Retro Enthusiasts that like playing around with old computers, We also believe that even a lot of the older stuff can find a useful purpose even in today’s fast paced internet addicted world. We are looking for things we can help with. Including but not limited to Preserving old websites (including but not limited to hosting old websites to ensure they will be around for future people to view and use) archive.org does a great job of this with their archiving effort. But we don’t just want to archive, We would like to keep things alive as well. The BBS affiliation is also a part of that belief .. We believe BBS’s still have an active roll in today’s society and with the ability to have access VIA web/telnet and other means we believe that it can be a place to enjoy for many people for many years to come.

If you have any suggestions or own an old website you just don’t have the time or resources to keep on line. Please contact us and we would do our best to keep things on line using resources that we have access to.

It has been a very busy couple of months, which is why this website has not seen any updates for some time. In that time, RetroDigital has seen some changes; We have added lots of new items; Some retro and some not.

Check out our Gallery and have a look at the new pictures in the RetroDigital Lab album.

One great ‘new’ (to us) item we have come across is our IBM PS/2 Model 70. It sports a 386DX / 20 Mhz processor. 4MB memory on board and 4MB memory on a memory expansion card.
Currently it runs DOS 6.22 / Windows 3.1. We have not changed anything on it in terms of software as of yet since we are waiting for a network card to arrive. Why is a network card an important component with regard to software, you ask? Well that’s part of the fun; If a machine is in the Retro Lab, we want to be able to set it up and add it to our network.

Here it is loading the game 100,000 Dollar Pyramid (By the way a much harder game then I remember).

Now that we have a working C64 we need to work on getting software. As well as the replacement C64 we picked up a tape drive for it,

although we have been unable to see if the drive works.[/jcolumns]
We are currently looking to acquire a 5.25″ floppy drive.
If anyone in the Calgary area has one that they would be willing to part with please contact us.